Genius Loci - Music Mix #50

 Modern Nature; Mana Pools; Malajube; Rocket; Grizzly Bear; Fleet Foxes; The Beta Band; Minus the Bear; Rose City Band; Tame Impala; Slowdive; Valerie June; Gordon Lightfoot; Wand; La Luz; The Lemon Twigs; Magdalena Bay; Roger Neil; David Bowie; El Michels Affair; Roge; Curtis Harding; David Byrne; Ghost Train Orchestra; Moondog; The Kronos Quartet; Saint Etienne; james k; Ivy; Anais and the Hoops; Trace Mountains; Haley Heynderickx; Max Garcia Conover; Gabriel Vitel; Dear Humans; The London Suede; Kyle Eastwood; Jonie Mitchell; Alicia Clara; Rachel Kitchlew; SFJ; SHOLTO; David Bardon; David Onka; Lorie Ladd; Reels Choir; Pat Kalla; Le Super Mojo; DjeuhDjoah; Rupert Pope; Giles Palmer; Metronomy; The Silver Snails; Whitmer Thomas; Movie Jail; Stereolab; Eleventh Dream Day; Avi Kaplan

Genius Loci - Music Mix #50

Nope (USA: Jordan Peele, 2022)

 

How do we live with some of the shit that we’ve been forced to watch on a daily basis? Why are we so eager to immortalize the worst images that our world is capable of producing, and what kind of awful power do we lend such tragedies by sanctifying them into spectacles that can play out over and over again? -- David Ehrlich (see link below)

 Nope (USA: Jordan Peele, 2022: 135 mins)

Eggert, Brian. "Nope." Deep Focus Review (July 21, 2022)

Ehrlich, David. "Nope Review: Jordan Peele’s Wildly Entertaining Blockbuster Is the Best Kind of Hollywood Spectacle." IndieWire (July 20, 2022) 

Flight, Thomas. "How Nope Tricks Your Ears." (Posted on Youtube: October 21, 2022)

---. "The Real Villain of Nope." (Posted on Youtube: September 29, 2022)

Ehrlich, David. "Nope: Jordan Peele’s Wildly Entertaining Blockbuster Is the Best Kind of Hollywood Spectacle." IndieWire (July 20, 2022)

Lyonhart, Jonathan D. "Peele’s Black, Extraterrestrial, Critique of Religion." Journal of Religion & Film (October 2023) ["While Jordan Peele’s films have always held their mysteries close to the chest, they eventually granted their viewers some climactic clarity. Get Out (2017) used an 1980s style orientation video to clear up its neuroscientific twist, while Us (2019) had Lupita Nyongo’s underworld twin narratively spell out the details of the plot. Yet Nope (2022) refuses to show its hand even after the game is over, never illuminating the connection between its opening scene and the broader film, nor a myriad of other questions. As such, critics complained that it stitched together two seemingly incongruent plots without explanation; one where a chimp attacks the crew of a successful Hollywood show, the other where an alien organism haunts a small ranch in the middle of nowhere. In this paper, I will argue that a theological interpretation of Nope helps explain some of these mysteries at its center, while revealing Peele’s underlying religious critique and its place within his broader oeuvre."]

Muncer, Mike and DeVaughn Taylor. "Nature Bites Back, Pt. 36: Nope." The Evolution of Horror (February 21, 2025) 

O'Donnell, Conor. "Nope: Jordan Peele Delivers Grand Sci-Fi Spectacle." The Film Stage (July 20, 2022)

Palis, Elena M. "The Brand of Peele."  Film Quarterly (December 12, 2023) ["Jordan Peele’s third feature film, Nope (2022), reenergized the already substantive circulation of “Peele” as auteur-star signifier. In their generic, political, and aesthetic coherence, Peele’s directorial features satisfy the classical auteur theorization of a knowable author and “authority.” Yet central to Peele’s signature films are resolute unpredictability, character shape-shifting, and narrative misdirection, epitomized by body snatchers in Get Out (2017), tethered doppelgängers in Us (2019), and aliens camouflaged by clouds in Nope. As an ironic manipulation of auteur knowability, Peele’s motif of deceptive, equivocal ontology requires a more complex understanding of Peele’s authorship, one that also takes into account Peele’s extrafilmic roles as producer, showrunner, and star persona."]

Peregrine, Rhys. "The Power of the Look: On Jordan Peele’s Nope." Bright Lights Film Journal (May 26, 2023) ["In this instance, the look is also a threat to those doing the looking. The act of seeing can be damaging not only to the target but also to the beholder. There are obvious parallels here with the consumption of exploitation film and how we, as audiences, are unwilling to look away, even when we should. It is what Peele referred to as “the dark side” of our obsession with spectacle."]

Veneto, Nicole. "Nope – Behold, the Great American Spectacle." The Arts Fuse (August 2, 2022)

Walters, Jacob. "Weird Wild West: On Jordan Peele’s Nope." Los Angeles Review of Books (September 24, 2022) 

ENG 281: Fall 2025 Resources #13

Hudson, David. "Oliver Laxe’s Sirât." Current (November 11, 2025) ["“The resilience of this group,” writes Filmmaker editor Scott Macaulay, “their small-scale collectivism, and the way in which dance, and drugs, are a kind of social and even spiritual practice, as opposed to simple escapism, made me think of the late Mark Fisher’s final unfinished work, ‘Acid Communism,’ and his thinking here is an analogue to the movie’s techno-scored hedonic flow: ‘The crucial defining feature of the psychedelic is the question of consciousness, and its relationship to what is experienced as reality. If the very fundamentals of our experience, such as our sense of space and time, can be altered, does that not mean that the categories by which we live are plastic, mutable?’”"]

Skidmore, James. Contemporary World Cinema: An Introduction to Moving Pictures  [Online, free, book on world cinema - great explanations of the basics of film analysis] 

  

Paterson (USA/Germany/France: Jim Jarmusch, 2016)

The poems, written by New York School poet Ron Padgett, appear on screen as they're read aloud in voiceover; they are ingenuous and winsome much like Jarmusch's films... PATERSON may be his most refreshing contradiction, a self-edit that puts not only his ethos into perspective, but also the whole concept of what it means to be an artist. - Kathleen Sachs (Cine-File, April 13, 2017)

Paterson doesn’t create his poems to be perfect, he doesn’t even want to read them out loud or publish. What seems to be truly important is the reflective and unconscious process of observing and putting words flow on paper. Despite of the art you’re making, Paterson tells us that there’s inspiration everywhere – it might come from chatter on the bus, strangers you meet on the street, from cherishing your loved ones, and even from such mundane object as the matchbox. - Inna Gvozdova

Jim Jarmusch jams
quotidian cine-poem of
extraordinary ordinary - Michael Benton

Paterson (USA/Germany/France: Jim Jarmusch, 2016: 118 mins)

Andrews, Mallory. "Now Playing: Paterson." Movie Mezzanine (January 3, 2017)

Bordwell, David. "Fantasy, flashbacks, and what-ifs: 2016 pays off the past." Observations on Film Art (January 2, 2017)

---. "A Poet's Summer: Paterson; A Quiet Passion." Observations of Film Art (October 8, 2016)

Flores, Steven. "The Auteurs: Jim Jarmusch." Cinemaxis (December 10, 2013)

Heffernan, Virginia. "No Ideas But in Non-Digital Things: Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson tackles poetry, New Jersey, and the Internet." Poetry Foundation (December 20, 2016) 

Taubin, Amy. "Common Sense: American indie axiom Jim Jarmusch talks about the art of routine in Paterson (and the assembly of chaos in Gimme Danger)." Film Comment (November/December 2016)

Taylor, Charles. "A Man in Himself Is a City: Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson." Los Angeles Review of Books (January 19, 2017)

Thurston, Michael. "What Paterson Gets Right About Poetry." The Massachusetts Review (February 24, 2017)

Overthink: Podcast that explores philosophy/theory through concepts/themes (Azimuths)

 Anderson, Ellie and David Peña-Guzmán. "Cleanliness." Overthink #128 (April 22, 2025) ["How often should you shower to remain ‘clean’? How many times can you re-wear your jeans before they are considered ‘dirty’? In episode 128 of Overthink, Ellie and David take a look at cleanliness. They get into how humans have turned cleanliness into an art, and maybe even an obsession. Why are we so bothered by dirt? What is dirt, anyways? How are notions of dirtiness and cleanliness even into our symbolic systems, including language and religion? And what is up with TikTok’s obsession with the Clean Girl Aesthetic? As they tackle these questions, your hosts also explore the historical weaponisation of the concept of cleanliness against marginalised groups, such as queer people and people of color. In the bonus, Ellie and David discuss cleanliness as a social construct, the link between it and isolation, and Michel Serres’s ‘excremental theory’ of private property."]

---. "Comfort." Overthink #118 (December 3, 2024) ["... Ellie and David discuss all things comfortable…and uncomfortable. They talk through the conflation of comfort and luxury, modern architecture’s prioritization of comfort, and whether our need for comfort is the reason for our burning planet. With everything from Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to “the comfort-industrial complex,” this episode will have you questioning what it takes for us to lead a full and happy life. Plus, in the bonus they get into the meaning of the phrase ‘too close for comfort’, alcohol as a destructive form of comfort, and the importance of attachment theory."]

---. "Confidence." #147 (November 11, 2025) ["Don’t shy away from this one! In episode 147 of Overthink, Ellie and David discuss confidence. Modernity has created a crisis of confidence, leading to the demand that we all maximize our confidence. But what is confidence? Is it a personality trait or a relational concept? What causes under- and over-confidence? And is instilling confidence an equity issue? Your hosts think through Charles Pépin’s pillars of confidence, Don A. Moore's formula for calibrating your confidence, and the gendered nature of confidence through bodily expressions."
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance”
Don A. Moore, Perfectly Confident: How to Calibrate Your Decisions Wisely
Charles Pépin, Self-Confidence: A Philosophy
Iris Marion Young, “Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body."]

---. "Exercise." Overthink #83 (August 1, 2023) ["Western philosophy started… at the gym. ... Ellie and David tackle the philosophy of workouts, from Plato’s days as a wrestler to the modern loneliness of a solitary bench press. As they discuss the role of exercise — which the Greeks called gymnastics — in building bodies and training souls, they consider the ancient Olympics, the cravings for health and beauty that guide us through what David calls the "Protestant work-out ethic," and Jean Baudrillard's thoughts about Americans' passion for jogging."]

 ---. "Masculinity." Overthink (September 23, 2025) ["Performative males, hustle bros, sissies, and manfluencers. In episode 140 of Overthink, Ellie and David discuss masculinity. What does it mean to be a man, and how has the concept of masculinity changed over time? They look at the male loneliness epidemic, the current influx of male influencers spreading right-wing rhetoric on the manosphere, and some of the main features of masculinity. Is masculinity rooted in violence and homophobia, or is it possible to have a healthy model of masculinity? In the Substack bonus, your hosts get into the mythopoetic men's movement and the connection between haircuts and masculinity." Robert Brannon and Deborah Sarah David, The Forty-nine Percent Majority: The Male Sex RolePierre Bourdieu, La domination masculine
R.W. Connell, Gender and Power
Bell Hooks, The Will To Change
James W. Messerschmidt, Hegemonic Masculinity
Joseph Pleck, The Myth of Masculinity
Todd W. Reeser, Moderating Masculinity in Early Modern Culture
Frans de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes]

---. "Reading." Overthink (May 21, 2024) ["Ellie and David consider what makes reading so rewarding, and, for many people today, so challenging! How did society shift toward inward silent reading and away from reading aloud in the Middle Ages? How have changes in teaching phonics and factors of classism, accessibility, and educational justice made it harder for the young to read? Why is reading philosophy so hard, and how can we increase our reading stamina?"]

Anderson, Ellie, et al. "Love in the Time of Replika." Hi-Phi Nation (April 25, 2023) ["We explore the lives of people who are in love with their AI chatbots. Replika is a chatbot designed to adapt to the emotional needs of its users. It is a good enough surrogate for human interaction that many people have decided that it can fulfill their romantic needs. The question is whether these kinds of romantic attachments are real, illusory, or good for the people involved. Apps like Replika represent the future of love and sex for a subpopulation of people, so we discuss the ethics of the practice. Host Barry Lam talks to philosophers Ellie Anderson and David Pena-Guzman of the Overthink podcast about what theories of love would say about these kinds of relationships. AI lovers include Alex Stokes and Rosanna Ramos."]

ENG 281: Fall 2025 Resources #12

Bellar-Tadier, Luna. "The Lesbian Allure and Colonial Unconscious of Todd Field’s Tár." Another Gaze (January 25, 2023) ["Tár is a rare film for this reason. Lydia’s type of appeal is not one that is depicted often, consisting as it does of the attractiveness and the desire that belong to a self-assured, powerful older woman who possesses no stereotypical feminine charm, but only the imposing matter-of-factness of her accomplishment, and a masculinity subtle enough to be invisible to an untrained or uninterested eye. Furthermore, Tár promises to deal precisely with the deep ambivalence which stems from the way such a figure both troubles and upholds existing modes of power. This appeal remains largely illegible in our heteronormative world (and in fact its general illegibility is an important part of its experience). It’s thrilling to see someone like this on the big screen, and to know that a straight audience is being made to understand that a young and conventionally attractive woman would pursue her (“Can I text you?” asks red bag woman, grasping Lydia’s hands when their flirtation is cut short by Francesca’s agitated intervention). Moreover, inasmuch as Tár echoes the plethora of contemporary “#MeToo” narratives, depicting this appeal is crucial to telling this story responsibly, for to not give the viewer a window into her desirability – sexual or otherwise – would render the women that flock to her mere dupes."]

 

Cucarro, Clara. "Quiet Americans: Kelly Reichardt’s Cinema of Attention." Notebook (October 17, 2025) ["Across 30 years of Reichardt’s cinema, mundane details and subtle gestures are often tasked with conveying the essence of her human dramas. In a profile for The New Yorker, Doreen St. Félix calls Reichardt America’s “finest observer of ordinary grit.” The description is apt, though her protagonists have depth as well as texture; their precise cultural and historical resonances belie their “ordinariness.” Reichardt’s filmography revolves around quiet Americans whose shyness, reticence, or reserve may be, at least in part, a response to the social conditions of their gender, class, and race. Think of Wendy (Michelle Williams), the drifter at the center of Wendy and Lucy (2008), whose economic precarity is evident in the way she counts her change and avoids eye contact; or Jamie (Lily Gladstone), the lonely Indigenous American ranch hand in Certain Women (2016), whose romantic longing for a professional white woman, Beth (Kristen Stewart), is never put into words. Avoiding unnatural dialogue that could reveal too much about her characters, Reichardt focuses on behavior, gesture, and routine, asking viewers to extrapolate character through visual cues rather than verbal exposition."]

Cunningham, Vinson, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz. "How Sinners Revives the Vampire." Critics at Large (May 1, 2025) ["The vampire has long been a way to explore the shadow side of society, and “Sinners,” Ryan Coogler’s new blockbuster set in the Jim Crow-era South, is no exception. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss what “Sinners,” which fuses historical realism with monster-movie-style horror, illuminates about America in 2025. They trace the archetype from such nineteenth-century texts as “The Vampyre” and “Dracula” to the “Twilight” moment of the aughts, when Edward Cullen, an ethical bloodsucker committed to abstinence, turned the vampire from a predatory outsider into a Y.A. heartthrob. What do he and his ilk have to say today? “The vampire is the one who can unsettle our notions, and maybe give us new notions,” Cunningham says. “The vampire comes in and asks, ‘But have you considered this?’ ”"]

Del Toro, Guillermo. "Frankenstein Director Guillermo del Toro." IndieWire's Filmmakers Toolkit (November 9, 2025) ["Beloved Director Guillermo del Toro sits down with the Filmmaker Toolkit to talk about making his dream film, and how 'Frankenstein' has been a part of each of his prior films. Then del Toro opens up about an end to his era of monster movies, and how achieving this lifelong goal may be the start of a new chapter in his filmmaking style."]

Hudson, David. "Noah Baumbach in L.A." Current (November 6, 2025) ["Sandler is up for a Gotham Award for his supporting performance in Jay Kelly, and the Gothams have already announced that this year’s Director Tribute will be going to Baumbach. George Clooney leads a packed cast as Jay Kelly, “the last of the great Hollywood stars,” as Ron (Sandler), his overworked manager, calls him. Writing about Jay Kelly for Film Comment, Molly Haskell finds that what’s “most interesting is the stark and increasingly awkward question that resounds with urgency . . . Can such an inherently unequal relationship, akin to master and slave, ever evolve into friendship? And how, if not, must that rankle?”"]

---. "Peter Watkins: Prescience and Punishment." Current (November 4, 2025) ["When the late, great independent distributor New Yorker Films began releasing the work of Peter Watkins on DVD in the mid-2000s, Amy Taubin wrote in Artforum that “at long last,” the moment may have come for “the most prescient, innovative, and accomplished of overlooked English-language movie masters.” Watkins passed away last Thursday, one day after turning ninety and twenty-five years after completing his last major work, La commune (Paris, 1871)."]

Lahr, John. "Every Blink." The London Review of Books (October 23, 2025)  [A review of Suddenly Something Clicked: The Languages of Film Editing and Sound Design by Walter Murch. Book description: "Highly lauded film editor, director, writer and sound designer Walter Murch reflects on the six decades of cinematic history he has been a considerable contributor to - and on what makes great films great.
Together with Francis Coppola and George Lucas, Murch abandoned Hollywood in 1969 and moved to San Francisco to create the Zoetrope studio. Their vision was of a new kind of cinema for a new generation of film-goers. Murch's subsequent contributions in film editing rooms and sound-mixing theatres were responsible for ground-breaking technical and creative innovations. In this book, Murch invites readers on a voyage of discovery through film, with a mixture of personal stories, meditations on his own creative tactics and strategies, and reminiscences from working on The Godfather films, Apocalypse Now, Lucas' American Grafitti, and Anthony Minghella's The English Patient and The Talented Mr Ripley. Suddenly Something Clicked is a book that will change the way you watch movies."]

Moran, Dan and Mike Takla. "The Beast: A Film by Bertrand Botello." Fifteen Minute Film Fanatics (November 10, 2025) ["Have you ever felt that you keep making the same mistakes or that you have fallen into a pattern that could be Exhibit A as proof of reincarnation? The Beast (2023) uses all kinds of world-building and three different timelines to explore these ideas–and does so while faithfully adapting a 1903 story by Henry James. It’s the kind of film in which one could be lost in the red arrows that point out movie Easter eggs all over YouTube, but the real draw of the film is its incredible performances and how it combines intricate plotting with emotional weight."]

Riley, Boots. "On Sorry to Bother You and Communism." The Dig (August 9, 2018) ["Sorry to Bother You is a hilarious film about the dead serious shitiness of life under neoliberalism's flexibilized and precarious labor regime, a system teetering upon a thin line between free labor exploitation and a form of expropriation reminiscent of full-on slave labor—all at the mercy of the thinly-veiled barbarity of Palo Alto-style techno-utopianism. It's about how capitalist society divides and conquers friends and family to claim not only our obedience but also our very souls, and about how the task of left organizing is to see through that game and fight together. Dan's guest today is Boots Riley, who wrote and directed the film and also fronts the left-wing hip hop group The Coup."]

Risker, Paul. "Devastating Truths and Transformation Through 'Soft Power': An Interview with Farah Nabulsi." Cineaste (Fall 2025)  ["Nabulsi describes The Teacher as a fiction film that is heavily rooted in truth, reality, and the injustices that are taking place. While she draws inspiration from different real-life stories, there is one that she says was a notable influence—the story of Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier who was abducted in 2006 and held until 2011. His eventual release secured the safe return of over a thousand Palestinian political prisoners. Nabulsi tells me that many of these prisoners were women and children that were held without trial or charge in administrative detention. “I was thinking, what an insane imbalance in value for human life.” The Teacher effectively penetrates the pseudo-complexity of the Palestinian and Israeli conflict by showing there's nothing complex about it. Mainstream news media and geopolitics have sought to create a myth of complexity, but Nabulsi takes us into the effects apartheid and forced occupation have on ordinary people. The Teacher is an important film because it gives a voice to the collective Palestinian trauma that is still denied by many in the international community."]

Wright, Joe. "Mussolini: Son of the Century: Joe Wright Gazes into the Abyss." MUBI Podcast (October 30, 2025) ["Joe Wright is known for Oscar-winning WWII epics like Darkest Hour (2007). But his latest look at the era is a different animal: the nightmarish series Mussolini: Son of the Century (2025), about the rise of the godfather of fascism. Joe tells host Rico Gagliano about the Italian dictator, the echoes he sees in politics today...and why he spent his teenage years blasting ’30s pop tunes."]

Uncut Gems (USA: Benny Safdie and Josh Safdie, 2019)

 

 Uncut Gems (USA: Benny Safdie and Josh Safdie, 2019: 135 mins)

This jolt of pure cinematic adrenaline affirmed directors Josh and Benny Safdie as heirs to the gritty, heightened realism of Martin Scorsese and John Cassavetes. Adam Sandler delivers an almost maniacally embodied performance as Howard Ratner, a fast-talking New York jeweler and gambler in relentless pursuit of the next big score. When he comes into possession of a rare opal, it seems Howard’s ship has finally come in—as long as he can stay one step ahead of a wife (Idina Menzel) who hates him, a mistress (Julia Fox) who can’t quit him, and a frenzy of loan sharks and hit men closing in on him. Wrapping a vivid look at the old-school Jewish world of Manhattan’s Diamond District within a kinetic thriller, Uncut Gems gives us one of the great characters in modern cinema: a tragic hero of competing compulsions on a shoot-the-moon quest to transcend his destiny. - Criterion Collection

Angel, Arielle, David Klion, and Jacob Plitman. "An Unserious Man." Jewish Currents (January 23, 2020) ["Uncut Gems, the Safdie brothers’ winter blockbuster starring Adam Sandler as Howard Ratner, a sleazy diamond dealer caught in an escalating series of debts, might be the most explicitly Jewish mainstream movie since the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man (2009). Its release prompted the following emergency meeting of the editorial staff of Jewish Currents to discuss what Uncut Gems says about contemporary Jewish identity."]

Bronstein, Ronald, et al. "Josh & Benny Safdie and Uncut Gems Team on the Making of Their Electrifying Crime Thriller." Film at Lincoln Center Podcast #256 (October 7, 2019) ["On Day 11 of our New York Film Festival daily podcast, we explore the making of the festival’s surprise screening, Uncut Gems. In the introduction, Eugene Hernandez, FLC’s Deputy Director and Co-Publisher of Film Comment, is joined by Eric Kohn, IndieWire’s Executive Editor & Chief Critic, to discuss NYFF, the importance of film festivals, and the evolution of the Safdies. Then we go to yesterday’s NYFF Live talk on the making of Uncut Gems, moderated by Kohn. Directors Josh and Benny Safdie (Heaven Knows What, Good Time) were on hand to detail the process of making this electrifying New York City-set thriller, joined by co-writer and editor Ronald Bronstein, producer Sebastian Bear McClard, composer Daniel Lopatin, and casting director Jen Venditti."]

Burke, Christopher. "The Global and the Hyperlocal: Chains of Exploitation, Voyeurism, and Family in Uncut Gems." (Personal Website: March 9, 2021)

David, Caylen. "Rethinking Uncut Gems: A Movie That Gets Better on Rewatch." Penn Moviegoer (July 24, 2019) ["I don’t think that Uncut Gems can be truly appreciated after your first viewing. Speaking from experience, viewers will likely be too preoccupied with catching up with each mishap in the fast-paced crime thriller to fully process and appreciate the Safdie Brothers’ creation. For instance, during my own initial watchthrough, I was too busy waiting for a plot-turning change of tone that never came, and because of that, I looked beyond the miniscule details that are necessary to understanding the movie and Sandler’s character. You have to really think about what’s happening and the larger reasons behind why things happen throughout the film, rather than passively watch the movie to finish the plot and see the ending. Additionally, you must understand that the film is intentionally an insanely but intentionally stressful experience, as that perfectly sets the tone for the protagonist’s downward spiral. Rewatching the film from this perspective made me realize that, while I initially cited Gems’ stress as a weakness, it’s actually the movie’s greatest strength."]

Eggert, Brian. "Uncut Gems." Deep Focus Review (Ongoing Archive)

Hoberman, J. "Uncut Gems: Taking it to the Rack." The Current (November 23, 2021)

Lazic, Manuela and Adam Nayman. "21st-Century Cinema in Review: Uncut Gems." The Ringer (October 31, 2025) ["Josh and Benny Safdie are talented filmmakers with a good sense of rhythm and an appealing documentary-like approach to fiction, and this may be their crowning achievement as a filmmaking duo. Uncut Gems follows the series of misfortunes and terrible decisions that a Jewish New York jeweler, played by the ever-ingratiating Adam Sandler, goes through over a few decisive days. A gambling addict and a bit of a dreamer, Howard genuinely loves gems, but also the NBA and money—a bad mix that makes his life a constant tightrope act. Together with revered director of photography Darius Khondji and Daniel Lopatin’s almost omnipresent score, the Safdies accentuate the tension under which Howie is living. The experience of watching this film is a visceral one where each twist of fate that befalls Howie is felt in your bones."]

McDonough, Alex. "The Thrilling Modernity of Uncut Gems." Medium (June 10, 2020)

Past Present Future: Political History Podcast (Shooting Azimuths)

Hosted by David Runciman




Blyth, Mark. "The History of Bad Ideas: Austerity." Past Present Future (June 15, 2025) ["For the first episode in our new series about how bad ideas take hold, David talks to economist Mark Blyth about austerity, the cost-cutting idea that refuses to die. Why is it an article of faith that states need periodic purging to stop them getting too greedy? Why does this so often happen at times when it does most harm, from the 1930s to the financial crisis that began in 2008? And how is the politics of austerity playing out today, in Starmer’s Britain, in Milei’s Argentina and in the DOGE wars happening in Trump’s America?"]

Chawlisz, Claudia. " Fixing Democracy: Citizens’ Assemblies." Past Present Future (September 21, 2025) ["David talks to Claudia Chwalisz, founder and CEO of Democracy Next, about how citizens’ assemblies could help fix what’s wrong with democracy. Where does the idea of a jury of citizens chosen at random to answer political questions come from? What are the kinds of contemporary questions it could help to settle? How does it work? And what would encourage politicians to listen to citizens’ assemblies rather than to their electorates?"]

Dabhoiwala, Fara. "The History of Revolutionary Ideas: Free Speech." Past Present Future (April 6, 2025) ["Today’s revolutionary idea is one with a long history, not all of it revolutionary: David talks to the historian Fara Dabhoiwala about the idea of free speech. When did free speech first get articulated as a fundamental right? How has that right been used and abused, from the eighteenth century to the present? And what changed in the history of the idea of free speech with the publication of J. S. Mill’s On Liberty in 1859?" Fara Dabhoiwala's book What is Free Speech: The History of a Dangerous Idea.]

Douglas, Alexander. "The History of Bad Ideas: Identity." Past Present Future (July 17, 2025) ["For the final episode in our current series on the history of bad ideas, David talks to philosopher Alexander Douglas about the damage that can be done by the idea of identity. Why is the search for a distinctive personal identity such a futile quest? How does it lead to an identity politics of exclusion and violence? What can we learn from the philosopher Spinoza about having an identity without identity? And what can we glean from the experience of dementia about losing ourselves?"]

Ellison, Ian. " Politics on Trial 100th Anniversary Special: Franz Kafka’s The Trial." Past Present Future (August 25, 2025) ["Today’s episode in Politics on Trial is about the most famous trial in literature and one that never actually takes place. David talks to writer and literary scholar Ian Ellison about Franz Kafka’s The Trial, first published in 1925. What is the meaning of a book about a legal process that never happens? How was it inspired by Kafka’s failed love life? Why has it given rise to so many different understandings of what makes our world Kafkaesque? And how did a work of fiction that is full of weird and wonderful ideas get associated with mindless bureaucracy?"]

Finlayson, Alan. "The History of Bad Ideas: Behaviorism." Past Present Future (July 13, 2025) ["In today’s episode of the history of bad ideas, David talks to political philosopher Alan Finlayson about behaviourism, a theory of psychology that has penetrated to the heart of politics. How did we get from Pavlov’s Dog to a prescription for a better society? What is the relationship between behavioural utopianism and contemporary economics? How did behaviourism get turned into something called ‘Nudge’? And if we are being nudged into better behaviour, what is left for politics?"]

Freedman, Sam. " Fixing Democracy: TikTok, Disinformation and Distraction." Past Present Future (October 19, 2025) ["In our penultimate episode in this series David talks to writer Sam Freedman about whether democracy can cope with the demands of the social media age. Are we really more vulnerable to disinformation than we have ever been? Is the bigger problem our ever-shrinking attention spans or our ever-divided politics? What happens to democracy as visual communication squeezes out the written word? And what might make things better?"]

Lewis, Helen. "The History of Bad Ideas: Genius." Past Present Future (June 19, 2025) ["Today’s bad idea is ‘genius’, the label that has enabled all sorts of terrible behaviour through the ages. Writer and broadcaster Helen Lewis explains how and why the idea of genius gets misapplied to people and things that just aren’t. Why are geniuses meant to be tortured? Why are individual geniuses prized over the collaborations that lie behind most innovations? Why do we think that people who are brilliant at one thing will be good at everything else?"]

Runciman, David. "Politics on Trial: A History of Lawfare." Past Present Future (May 18, 2025) ["To introduce our new series about historic political trials – from Socrates to Marine Le Pen – David explores what makes political confrontations in a court of law so fascinating and so revealing. Why do even the worst of dictators still want to play by the rules? What happens when realpolitik and legal principles collide? How does the political system often find itself in the dock? Who wins and who loses in the great game of lawfare?"]

---. "Politics on Trial: Charles I vs Parliament." Past Present Future (June 12, 2025) ["Today’s political trial is perhaps the most consequential in English history: the trial and execution of King Charles I for treason in January 1649. How could a king commit treason when treason was a crime against the king? How could a court try a king when a king has no peers? How could anyone claim to speak for the people after a civil war when so many people had been on opposite sides? The answers to these questions would cost more than one person his life – but they would also change forever the prospect of holding tyrants to account."]

---. "Politics on Trial: Galileo vs the Inquisition." Past Present Future (June 8, 2025) ["Today’s trial is one of the most notorious in history but also one of the most misremembered. Galileo’s epic confrontation with the Catholic Church over the question of whether the earth moves round the sun – culminating with his interrogation and condemnation in Rome in 1633 – was not just a matter of truth vs ignorance or science vs superstition. It was also twenty-year long struggle on the part of both sides to find a way to co-exist. Did they succeed? Not exactly, but it wasn’t for want of trying. Then – and perhaps now – science and religion needed each other."]

---. "Politics on Trial: Hitler vs Weimar." Past Present Future (August 31, 2025) ["Today’s epic political trial is the one that should have been the end of Adolf Hitler but ended up being the making of him: his treason trial in 1924 for the so-called Beer Hall Putsch. How close did Hitler’s attempted coup come to succeeding? Why was he allowed to turn the court that tried him into a platform for his poisonous politics? What were the missed opportunities to silence him once and for all?"]

---. "Politics on Trial: Mary Queen of Scots vs the Secret State." Past Present Future (June 1, 2025) ["In today’s episode an extraordinary political trial that culminated in the execution of one queen at the behest of another: Mary Queen of Scots, convicted of treason in 1586 and beheaded in 1587. But who really wanted her dead, Queen Elizabeth or Elizabeth’s powerful political servants? Why did Mary demand to be tried before parliament rather than a court of noblemen? How did she attempt to defend herself in the face of apparently overwhelming incriminating evidence against her? And who was the only person who voted for her acquittal?"]

---. "Politics on Trial: Socrates vs Democracy." Past Present Future (May 22, 2025) ["The first political trial in our new series is the one that set the template for all the others: the trial of Socrates in Athens in 399 BCE, which ended with a death sentence for the philosopher and a permanent stain on the reputation of Athenian democracy. Why, after a lifetime of philosophy, was Socrates finally prosecuted at the age of 70? Was the case motivated by private grievance or public outrage? What should Socrates have said in his own defence? Why, in the end, did he choose defiance instead?"]

---. "Politics on Trial: Thomas More vs the King." Past Present Future (May 29, 2025) ["In today’s episode another trial that forms the basis for great drama: the case of Thomas More, tried and executed in 1535, events dramatised by Robert Bolt in A Man for All Seasons and Hilary Mantel in Wolf Hall. How did More try to argue that silence was no evidence of treason? Why was his defence so legalistic? Was he really ‘the Socrates of England’? And who was the true villain in this case: Thomas Cromwell, Richard Rich or the King himself?"]

Runciman, David and Dan Snow. "The History of Bad Ideas: The Decisive Battle." Past Present Future (June 22, 2025) ["In today’s episode about the power of bad ideas, David talks to historian and podcaster Dan Snow about the myth that wars are settled on the battlefield. Why are we so drawn to the idea of the decisive military showdown? Is Napoleon to blame? What are the forces that actually settle military conflicts?"]

Vallor, Shannon. "The History of Bad Ideas: Value-Free Tech." Past Present Future (July 6, 2025) ["For today’s episode in the history of bad ideas David talks to philosopher Shannon Vallor about the myth that technology can be value free. It’s easy to see why Silicon Valley is so keen on the idea that it’s never the fault of the tech, only of the people who use it. But why do we let them get away with it? Where did this idea come from? How has it also poisoned arguments about gun laws and nuclear weapons? And what can we do to fight it and try to get technology that works with – not against – basic human values?"]

Book Culture 2025 #2

    Reality, considered in itself and as a whole, is a chaos so deep and immense that it exceeds any possibility of being understood or experienced. Even something as small as a pebble, if we consider it to the full extent of its existence, becomes a mystery beyond comprehension. We can detect only a fragment of this chaos, as filtered by our perceptive apparatus and cognitive limits. Through our imagination, based on our personal inclinations and on the cosmological assumptions of our society, we mould this remaining piece into one of the infinite forms that reality can take. This activity of the imagination provides us with a cosmos, a 'world': a place where we can develop those structures of sense that shelter us from the trauma of having been thrown unprepared into a mortal life. Then, spurred by the force of habit and by a desire for comfort, we become progressively convinced that the world we have constructed is an accurate picture of 'nature,' and that reality coincides with the metaphysical consensus of a particular society at a certain moment in history. We tend to forget the imaginary essence of the 'world' that we see around ourselves, and we start drawing hard distinctions between what we seen as 'truly existing' and what we set aides as 'mere fantasy.' (4)

    This, too, is a timely lesson: if rational languages, such as philosophy and science, aim to offer a structure of sense for human life, they must recognize themselves, at least in part, as forms of literature. If they want to make their hard logical kernel inhabitable by living creatures, they should not overlook the need to translate into the soft substance of narrative. (10)

    Since the infinite chaos of reality will always exceed the limits of any conceptual system, we should recognize that all of our attempts at reducing it to a meaningful cosmos are merely 'likely stories' - like the eikos mythos of Plato's Timaeus - at once plagued by, and endowed with, the porous quality of literature. Every conceptual world that we might devise is ultimately a story for us to live by, and the better ones are not those that reach closer to an absolute truth beyond our grasp, but those that are spacious and flexible enough to offer an imaginary home where a dignified life for all becomes possible. (10 - 11)
Campagna, Frrederico. Otherworldly: Mediterranean Lessons on Escaping History. Bloomsbury, 2025.

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Abrams, Nathan. "Kubrick's World: Power, Paranoia, and the Politics of the Human Condition." International Horizons (October 28, 2025) ["In this episode of International Horizons, Interim Director Eli Karetny speaks with film scholar Nathan Abrams about the enduring relevance of Stanley Kubrick and what his work can teach us about our current era. From the nuclear absurdities of Dr. Strangelove to the cosmic rebirth of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick’s films expose the fragile line between technological mastery and moral collapse. Abrams unpacks Kubrick’s fascination with war, authority, and obedience, his roots in the New York Jewish intellectual tradition, and his exploration of mystical and mythic themes—from Kabbalah to The Odyssey. Together, they reveal how Kubrick’s cinematic universe reflects our own: a world where human creativity, paranoia, and power intertwine in both terrifying and illuminating ways."]

Ford, Phil and J.F. Martel. "What a Fool Believes: On the Unnumbered Card in the Tarot." Weird Studies #77 (July 8, 2020) ["'What a fool believes he sees, no wise man can reason away.' This line from a Doobie Brothers song is probably one of the most profound in the history of rock-'n'-roll. It is profound for all the reasons (or unreasons) explored in this discussion, which lasers in on just one of the major trumps of the traditional tarot deck, that of the Fool. The Fool is integral to the world, yet stands outside it. The Fool is an idiot but also a sage. The Fool does not know; s/he intuits, improvises a path through the brambles of existence. We intend this episode on the Fool to be the first in an occasional series covering all twenty-two of the major trumps of the Tarot of Marseilles." List of books mentioned/discussed on the page.]

Gourgouris, Stathis. "On Edward Said's Orientalism." Writ Large (November 8, 2022) ["Beginning in the 17th century, European countries began colonizing countries east of Europe. They imposed their own ideas over local cultures and extracted free labor and resources. One way that European colonizers justified this exploitation was through an academic discipline called Orientalism. In 1978, Edward Said, a professor of literature at Columbia University, published a book of the same name, Orientalism. In his critique, he challenged Europeans’ construction of the so-called “East,” laid bare the biases of Orientalist study, and transformed the course of humanities scholarship. Stathis Gourgouris is a professor of classics, English, and comparative literature at Columbia University. He is the author of books such as Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization, and the Institution of Modern Greece and Does Literature Think?: Literature as Theory for an Antimythical Era."]

Grady, Constance. "The right is obsessed with Lord of the Rings. But they don’t understand it." Vox (October 31, 2025) ["Among the many humiliations of being American in the current moment is this: Members of the tech right and the conservative ruling class continually fetishize objects of nerd culture while also displaying a willful inability to grasp the very basic messages those objects are sending. While there are certainly worse problems (e.g. white nationalism in the White House), the blazing lack of reading comprehension from people who are allegedly smart does give one pause. Put simply, these people are bad nerds."]

Lahr, John. "Every Blink." The London Review of Books (October 23, 2025)  [A review of Suddenly Something Clicked: The Languages of Film Editing and Sound Design by Walter Murch. Book description: "Highly lauded film editor, director, writer and sound designer Walter Murch reflects on the six decades of cinematic history he has been a considerable contributor to - and on what makes great films great.
Together with Francis Coppola and George Lucas, Murch abandoned Hollywood in 1969 and moved to San Francisco to create the Zoetrope studio. Their vision was of a new kind of cinema for a new generation of film-goers. Murch's subsequent contributions in film editing rooms and sound-mixing theatres were responsible for ground-breaking technical and creative innovations. In this book, Murch invites readers on a voyage of discovery through film, with a mixture of personal stories, meditations on his own creative tactics and strategies, and reminiscences from working on The Godfather films, Apocalypse Now, Lucas' American Grafitti, and Anthony Minghella's The English Patient and The Talented Mr Ripley. Suddenly Something Clicked is a book that will change the way you watch movies."]

Like Stories of Old. "The Problem of Other Minds – How Cinema Explores Consciousness." (Posted on Youtube: May 31, 2018) ["How have films engaged the problem of other minds? In this video essay, I discuss cinematic explorations into consciousness in the context of the cognitive revolution that has challenged many of the basic assumptions about what was for a long time believed to be a uniquely human trait." Uses Frans de Waal's book Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?: "Hailed as a classic, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? explores the oddities and complexities of animal cognition--in crows, dolphins, parrots, sheep, wasps, bats, chimpanzees, and bonobos--to reveal how smart animals really are, and how we've underestimated their abilities for too long. Did you know that octopuses use coconut shells as tools, that elephants classify humans by gender and language, and that there is a young male chimpanzee at Kyoto University whose flash memory puts that of humans to shame? Fascinating, entertaining, and deeply informed, de Waal's landmark work will convince you to rethink everything you thought you knew about animal--and human--intelligence."]

Stonebridge, Lyndsey. "Hannah Arendt's Lessons on Love and Disobedience." Recall This Book (September 4, 2025) ["Lyndsey Stonebridge discusses her widely praised 2024 We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience. Lyndsey sees both radical evil and the banality of evil at work in Nazi Germany and in the causes of suffering and death in Gaza today. She compares the moral idiocy of authoritarians (like the murderous Nazis and those who are starving Gaza) to that of philosophers who cannot hear the echoes of what they are doing."]

Stoop, Daan. "Peter Singer and Fifty Years of Animal Liberation." The Philosopher (June 4, 2025) ["In 2023’s Animal Liberation Now, the revised edition of Animal Liberation, Singer replaces outdated examples with new ones that are just as appalling. He calls the chapters on animal testing and industrial farming ‘shocking, both then and now’. Yet this grimness doesn’t prevent him from staying clear-headed. ‘I deliberately avoid emotional language,’ he once told The Guardian. ‘I’ve never considered myself an animal lover and I don’t want to speak only to animal lovers. I want people to see this as a fundamental moral wrong.’ Animal Liberation Now describes how old battery cages were replaced by ‘enriched’ ones; and how lab animals, while now somewhat better protected, are still used on a massive scale. The logic of exploitation remains: animals are still treated as machines that convert cheap feed into profitable meat. What appears to be progress often turns out to be merely cosmetic."]

Walter, Shoshanna. "Rehab: An American Scandal." New Books in Drugs, Addiction, and Recovery (November 8, 2025) ["In Rehab: An American Scandal (Simon and Schuster, 2025), Pulitzer finalist Shoshana Walter exposes the country’s failed response to the opioid crisis, and the malfeasance, corruption, and snake oil which blight the drug rehabilitation industry. Our country’s leaders all seem to agree: People who suffer from addiction need treatment. Today, more people have access to treatment than ever before. So why isn’t it working? The answer is that in America—where anyone can get addicted—only certain people get a real chance to recover. Despite record numbers of overdose deaths, our default response is still to punish, while rehabs across the United States fail to incorporate scientifically proven strategies and exploit patients. We’ve heard a great deal about the opioid crisis foisted on America by Big Pharma, but we’ve heard too little about the other half of this epidemic—the reason why so many remain mired in addiction. Until now. In this book, you’ll find the stories of four people who represent the failures of the rehab-industrial complex, and the ways our treatment system often prevents recovery. April is a black mom in Philadelphia, who witnessed firsthand how the government’s punitive response to the crack epidemic impeded her own mother’s recovery—and then her own. Chris, a young middle-class white man from Louisiana, received more opportunities in his addiction than April, including the chance to go to treatment instead of prison. Yet the only program the judge permitted was one that forced him to perform unpaid back-breaking labor at for-profit companies. Wendy is a mother from a wealthy suburb of Los Angeles, whose son died in a sober living home. She began investigating for-profit treatment programs—yet law enforcement and regulators routinely ignored her warnings, allowing rehab patients to die, again and again. Larry is a surgeon who himself struggled with addiction, who would eventually become one of the first Suboxone prescribers in the nation, drawing the scrutiny of the Drug Enforcement Administration. Together, these four stories illustrate the pitfalls of a system that not only fails to meet the needs of people with addiction, but actively benefits from maintaining their lower status. They also offer insight into how we might fix that system and save lives."]

Warner, Melanie. "Pandora’s Lunchbox: Pulling Back the Curtain On How Processed Food Took Over the American Meal." Democracy Now (March 1, 2013) ["We look deep inside the $1-trillion-a-year “processed-food-industrial complex” to examine how decades of food science have resulted in the cheapest, most addictive and most nutritionally inferior food in the world. The vitamins added back to this packaged and fast food — which amounts to 70 percent of calories consumed in the United States — come from nylon, sheep grease and petroleum. We are joined by longtime food reporter Melanie Warner, author of “Pandora’s Lunchbox: How Processed Food Took Over the American Meal.”"]

ENG 281: Fall 2025 Resources #11

Abrams, Nathan. "Kubrick's World: Power, Paranoia, and the Politics of the Human Condition." International Horizons (October 28, 2025) ["In this episode of International Horizons, Interim Director Eli Karetny speaks with film scholar Nathan Abrams about the enduring relevance of Stanley Kubrick and what his work can teach us about our current era. From the nuclear absurdities of Dr. Strangelove to the cosmic rebirth of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick’s films expose the fragile line between technological mastery and moral collapse. Abrams unpacks Kubrick’s fascination with war, authority, and obedience, his roots in the New York Jewish intellectual tradition, and his exploration of mystical and mythic themes—from Kabbalah to The Odyssey. Together, they reveal how Kubrick’s cinematic universe reflects our own: a world where human creativity, paranoia, and power intertwine in both terrifying and illuminating ways."]

Budhathoki, Abishek. "After the Ban, Toward Enlightenment: Bhutan’s New Wave of Spiritual Cinema." Notebook (October 16, 2025) ["After a delayed start, Bhutanese filmmakers are creating a distinctive cinematic language grounded in their cultural memory, forging a new wave of cinema that stages a dialogue between tradition and innovation, spiritual insight and artistry. From this remarkably compressed timeframe has come a body of work that resists Western narrative and cinematic conventions. These films have proven that a national cinema does not require decades of development before achieving philosophical sophistication. Instead, by drawing directly from centuries of Buddhist thought and practice, Bhutan’s directors have created mature meditations on existence, attachment, and transcendence. As this youngest of all national cinemas continues to evolve, it stands as proof that innovation in film language comes from a thoughtful translation of tradition, essential insights, and storytelling strategies into contemporary forms."]

Burr, Ty. "What Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘The Conversation’ tried to tell us." The Washington Post (August 9, 2024) ["The surveillance state that seemed so far-fetched in 1974 turned out to be a mild harbinger of the state of surveillance 50 years later."]

Irazuzta, Javier. The Prop and the Production Designer." Notebook (October 3, 2025) ["Eight industry veterans discuss a single object or piece of scenery from their work and its role in the worlds of their films."]

Nayman, Adam. "Jafar Panahi’s Revenge Road Trip Masterpiece." The New Republic (October 14, 2025) ["It Was Just An Accident reckons with cruelty and repression."]

Now, Gaspar. "“Cinema Is Connected to Dreams”: Lucile Hadžihalilović, in Conversation with Gaspar Noé." Interview (October 13, 2025) ["Lucile, best known for her hypnotic, unsettling films Innocence, Evolution, and her latest, The Ice Tower, a haunting new work starring Marion Cotillard, has built a body of films that explore transformation, awakening, and the mystery of being alive. That morning, she and Gaspar talked about the movies that shaped her. They’ve shared a life in cinema, but this was the first time they had really sat down to do something like this: a filmmaker looking back on the stories and images that formed her. What follows is not just a talk about movies, but about the process itself, the work, the obsession, the joy."]

"One Battle After Another (USA: Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025)." Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Archive of Resources)

Rutigliano, Olivia. "Guillermo del Toro’s New Frankenstein Adaptation is Life-Giving." Literary Hub (October 29, 2025) ["Del Toro treats his Creature with love and tenderness, even more than Shelley does in her novel; he makes the Creature’s first word (and only word, for a while) “Victor,” the way a child might repeat “mama” or “dada” once it realizes it can refer to its protector with a name. Del Toro, who has written and produced this film in addition to directing it, deftly reads Shelley’s text as a story of parental abandonment, building out a wider story of parental abuse and neglect, emphasizing the tragic dehumanization and alienation that the Creature experiences after being forced into existence. That “Victor” means so much to the Creature even while “Victor” imprisons him, beats him, experiments on him, and tries to destroy him contains the thesis of the film. Del Toro bifurcates his version as Shelley does her novel, with each man getting to tell his story, but the whole movie, in effect, is a requiem for the Creature, who is governed above all else, by the desire to love and be loved in return."]

First Reformed (USA: Paul Schrader, 2017)

First Reformed (USA: Paul Schrader, 2017: 108 mins) 

"Unless I miss my guess, “First Reformed” will find its least receptive audiences among those who want either a conventional psychological drama or a dogmatic exposition of spiritual themes. Neither is what Schrader’s after. From the first, style as a way of engendering spiritual consciousness has been his primary concern. In a welcome new edition of Transcendental Style, he writes of creating 'an alternate film reality—a transcendent one,” in which, “The filmmaker, rather than creating a world in which the viewer need only surrender … creates a world in which the spectator must contemplate—or reject out of hand.'

Will the film’s most appreciative viewers be those who know Schrader’s writings, his previous work and the great films whose influence he freely acknowledges? No doubt. Yet “First Reformed” leaves its large front door open to anyone who accepts its invitation to adopt a contemplative stance toward cinema. For those who do, the film’s peculiar mysteries and beauties will be evident throughout: in its restrained compositions and uses of silence and empty space, in the almost liturgical unfolding of its narrative, in a climactic scene of imaginary flight and a final scene that seems aptly designed to leave one catching one’s breath, caught in the very act of contemplating this tale of faith and its worldly opponents." - Godfrey Cheshire

"First Reformed marks a considerable turning point, a film à thèse about the struggle for grace and faith in our modern world of hyper-reality and despair, especially when the various stopgaps offered by society—organized religion, political institutions, ecological activism—seem variously counterfeit. A breathtaking, taut work possessed of an otherworldly meditative stillness, it feels at once hauntingly out of time and haltingly urgent. "  - Best Films of the Decade

Ahmed, Nafees. "First Reformed (2018): Spiritual Collapse Under Crisis of Faith." High on Films (August 14, 2018)

Brunsting, Joshua. "Paul Schrader's First Reformed." Criterion Cast (May 15, 2018)

Cage, Nicholas. "Paul Schrader Tells Nicholas Cage Why First Reformed is His Masterpiece." Andy Warhol's Interview (April 6, 2018)

Cheshire, Godfrey. "First Reformed." Roger Ebert (May 18, 2018)

"First Reformed." Fifteen Minute Film Fanatics (May 13, 2024) ["In a recent interview, Paul Schrader said he was lucky with Taxi Driver because he “caught the zeitgeist.” He may have done so again with First Reformed (2017), a film that reflects the age of extremism in which we now live. Join us for a long conversation about a person who might be called the “green Travis Bickle” and who trades in one religion for another, only to find that he can’t give his new set of beliefs as much as he thought he could. Reverend Toller (Ethan Hawke) is an admirer of Thomas Merton; his renowned The Seven Story Mountain (1948) tells the story of his entering Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky."]

Funk, Carolyn. "One Shot / First Reformed." Notebook (February 19, 2025) 

Hudson, David. "Venice + Toronto 2017: Schrader's First Reformed." The Current (August 30, 2017)

Phillips, Michael. "First Reformed filmmaker Paul Schrader on hope, despair and 'this odd moment we're in now.'" Chicago Tribune (May 22, 2018)

Schrader, Paul. "First Reformed." Film Comment Podcast (June 21, 2018) ["“Although religious symbols and themes have often found their way into Schrader’s film work, First Reformed marks the first time he has applied elements of transcendental style—as extolled in his seminal book Transcendental Style in Film—to his own filmmaking. Early in his career, Schrader was occupied with exploring the pathological lure of sex and violence in narrative cinema,” Aliza Ma wrote in her review of Paul Schrader’s First Reformed for our May/June issue. As part of our Film Comment Free Talks series, Schrader joined Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold for a conversation about the twists and turns and leaps in the writer-director’s career—from starting out as a critic and UCLA film student in the ’60s, to writing screenplays for Taxi Driver and Last Temptation of Christ, to directing films from Blue Collar through First Reformed."]

Silent Dawn. "First Reformed." Letterboxd (June 9, 2018) ["The Agony and the Ecstasy - Paul Schrader’s First Reformed abides by the two. A responsibility of selflessness, compassion, and community conflicts with the desire to understand oneself, to become impersonal for the sake of solace. Reverend Toller finds the worst in both extremes – a sobering discovery in modern times. His fortress, or his homestead, mountains surrounding the border, is First Reformed Church – a last stand against Abundant Life megachurch (which Toller is subservient to), young right-wing extremists, and clear-cut religious philosophies. Toller attempts to speak for all, and he is frequently lambasted for being too vague, too opaque, lost in the mystery hanging in the air. His church is the eye in a hurricane, and it’s closing in, tightening around the throat, shape-shifting into a prison. "]

One Battle After Another (USA: Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025)

 One Battle After Another (USA: Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025: 162 mins)

Anderson, Paul Thomas and Leonardo DiCaprio. "Leonardo DiCaprio Unfiltered." Esquire (August 13, 2025) [The two are discussing their upcoming film One Battle After Another. "How do you get the actor talking? Put him in a room with Paul Thomas Anderson. During hours of conversation, two era-defining men—on the record together for the first time—went deep. They cracked some jokes, too."]

Anderson, Paul Thomas, et al. "One Battle After Another." Film at Lincoln Center Podcast #625 (October 17, 2025) ["This week we’re excited to present a conversation with Paul Thomas Anderson, Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro, Teyana Taylor, Regina Hall, and Chase Infiniti as they discuss their hit film One Battle After Another, which was recently presented on 70mm at our Walter Reade Theater. This conversation was moderated by NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. In One Battle After Another, washed-up revolutionary Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio) exists in a state of stoned paranoia, surviving off-grid with his spirited, self-reliant daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti). When his evil nemesis resurfaces after 16 years and Bob’s daughter goes missing, the former radical scrambles to find her, father and daughter both battling the consequences of his past. Paul Thomas Anderson’s most viscerally thrilling film to date is a total blast, an epic, comic adventure of the weird new America that spans years and stretches from across the treacherous rolling-hill highways of the southwest and beyond. Inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, but with a flavor and cinematic rush that’s pure PTA, One Battle After Another is an exhilarating, ultimately moving portrait of undying commitment to family amidst the mania of our contemporary world."]

Bale, Miriam, et al. "Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another." The Film Comment Podcast (October 24, 2025) ["Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another has been the talk of the town since its wide release last month—from critics to filmmakers to audiences, the reception has been nothing short of euphoric. Loosely inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland, the film opens in an unspecified present, detailing the activities of a militant group led by a Black revolutionary (played by Teyana Taylor). Years after her disappearance, her partner (Leonardo DiCaprio) and their daughter (newcomer Chase Infiniti) are hunted down by an old enemy, Sean Penn’s Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw. The chase takes them across California, with an assortment of other characters becoming embroiled along the way. The movie is an unabashedly fun, feel-good action flick—one that also calls back to films as disparate as The Searchers, Commando, and Running on Empty. But is it among the greatest of the decade, as some have claimed? Film Comment Editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish invited critics and programmers Miriam Bale and Adam Piron on the Podcast to discuss the film’s successes and failures, how it fits into PTA’s larger body of work, and its engagement with American history and the present. If there’s one thing the four agreed on, it’s that One Battle After Another is indeed a “very rich text.”"]

Bianchi, Pietro. "(Female) Enjoyment as a Political Factor in One Battle After Another." e-flux (October 17, 2025) ["The novelty of One Battle After Another is that the impossible totality—which no longer seems to have a dominant register and instead disperses into a thousand fragments, digressions, comic intermissions, and dramatic closures—has never revolved so insistently around an absent center. A center that perhaps constitutes both the allegory and the singular embodiment of the impossibility of totality. That absent center consists of the character who, in Vineland, was Frenesi, and who here goes by the name of Perfidia Beverly Hills, played by Teyana Taylor."]

Cira, Mark. "One Battle After Another." Letterboxd (September 30, 2025)  ["In Tarantino's revisionism, he takes aim at the bullshit liberalism the hippy counterculture curdled into. Anderson’s target is more formidable: the military industrial complex. It’s a fairer fight, or at least a more honest one. As Hollywood's collaboration with the Pentagon and intelligence agencies deepened throughout the 2000s - Zero Dark Thirty, the Marvel military partnerships, the CIA's script consultations, Gen-X irony started to look less like detachment and more like complicity. The nihilism that seemed like coked-out swagger in the '90s needed some re-evaluation."]

Goi, Leonardo. "In Sunny Southland: Paul Thomas Anderson and Thomas Pynchon’s California." Notebook (November 24, 2025) ["By 1970, when Anderson was born in Studio City, Pynchon had quit his gig writing safety articles for Boeing in Seattle and decamped to Los Angeles. He landed in a small apartment in Manhattan Beach, which would appear in his books as the fictional Gordita Beach, a last resort for bums, drifters, punks, and drop-outs determined to steer clear of the straight life. And though his novels have journeyed far and wide—from New York City (V., 1963; Bleeding Edge, 2013) to Chicago (Against the Day, 2006); from the American colonies (Mason & Dixon, 1997) to Europe, Namibia, and Siberia (Gravity’s Rainbow, 1973)—Pynchon has become closely identified with the countercultural hangover that swept through post-Manson California and serves as backdrop for the two texts Anderson would go on to adapt, Inherent Vice (2009) and now Vineland (1990). Novelist and filmmaker are unmistakably smitten with the textures of “sunny Southland,” to use a phrase popularized in the late 1800s by newspaper editor Harrison Gray Otis (who incidentally lifted it from the Confederacy). But they reserve their deepest feeling for its eccentric residents—drifters who straddle the old and the new, who have only just started to realize how the changing of the guard is leaving them behind, who have seen their turf transform to the point they can barely recognize it. Still, neither artist has ever simplistically romanticized that bygone milieu. Their characters fumble as they navigate a world rife with signs, secrets, and conspiracies, a California candied not with “identifiable cit[ies]” but with “grouping[s] of concepts,” where everyone and everything suggests “a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning,” per The Crying of Lot 49. That novel came out in April 1966, just a few months before Reagan was elected governor, promising to crack down on the “filthy speech movement” fueled by the student protests at Berkeley and to send “the welfare bums back to work.” The repression and censorship that would dominate Reagan-era California (and eventually all of the United States under his presidency) permeate Vineland and Inherent Vice, in which the actor-turned-politico serves as an omnipresent specter, a kind of daemon ex machina restoring fascism at home and abroad. A mood of chronic paranoia permeates Pynchon’s prose and Anderson’s cinema; what binds them isn’t just some autobiographical affair with Los Angeles but an interest in its sinister side: In the words of Inherent Vice’s Detective Lieutenant “Bigfoot” Bjornsen, “The dark forces that are always there just out of the sunlight.”"]

Hudson, David. "One Rave After Another." Current (September 25, 2025) ["The hype is real,” announces Adam Nayman in his review of One Battle After Another at the Ringer. Currently the highest-ranked film of the year at Letterboxd, Paul Thomas Anderson’s tenth feature is also riding high at Metacritic with a score of ninety-five. “There are sequences here,” writes Nayman, “so fluid and lucid—so controlled in terms of composition, cutting, and the hurtling, all-in sensation theorized by film scholar David Bordwell as ‘intensified continuity’—that remaining skeptics may feel obliged to bend the knee.”"]

Irazuzta, Javier. "The Prop and the Production Designer." Notebook (October 3, 2025) ["Eight industry veterans discuss a single object or piece of scenery from their work and its role in the worlds of their films."]

Klion, David. "How One Battle After Another Imagines an Armed Left." The New Republic (October 3, 2025) ["The rebels in Paul Thomas Anderson’s movie resemble the Weather Underground less than the right’s conspiratorial image of 'antifa supersoldiers.'"]

Lewis, Josh. "One Battle After Another." Letterboxd (September 27, 2025)

Llinares, Dario. "One Critical Battle After Another: Ideology v Aesthetics." Cinema Body/Cinema Mind (October 6, 2025) ['Emerging from the cavernous majesty of the Waterloo IMAX, I stumbled out slightly disoriented, still trying to process the sheer scale of the audiovisual spectacle I had just witnessed. The vertigo-inducing final sequence, a slow-burn car chase across the Southern California desert, is so physically and sensually intense - its suspense gradually accumulating until the dénouement arrives with a crash (literally and figuratively) - that it left me feeling exhilarated, awestruck even."]

Smith, Nathaniel. "One Battle After Another is a masterful film about the melancholy of moral compromise." Premier Christianity (October 7, 2025) ["It’s the kind of art that demands attention, so by extension it’s the sort of cinema that Christians who want to engage with culture should rush to see."]